Humour, youthful energy and catchy songs have been trademarks of the Barenaked Ladies’ since the band’s formation. Now that the five members are family men, it’s only natural that new release Snacktime, is a children’s album.
Consisting of 24 short tracks, Snacktime is pure fun and entertainment for listeners of any age. Vocalist Steven Page admits keeping both children and parents happy was a priority.
“We all have kids, so we’ve all spent lots of time in the car listening to absolutely excruciating kids music … kids always want to hear stuff multiple times. We tried to create something people can listen to multiple times and we wanted a lot of variety. That was the other nice appeal of having short songs, we could then put a lot of songs on the record and keep it fresh over the course of it.”
Song titles include Pollywog in a Bog, Vegetable Town, My Big Sister and Here Come the Geese. It’s hard to keep a straight face listening to Snacktime and Page says it was a liberating experience to intentionally write a funny record aimed at children.
“You want to be funny for your own kids and our own kids are so sick of our own jokes that we had to come up with fresh stuff. In a lot of ways we felt a lot of freedom making the record both musically and as far as humour goes. When we try to make our regular records we’ve always straddled that line between humorous and serious and maybe the humour gets in the way or overshadows the serious stuff,” he says.
“Here on this record most of the stuff is really fun; it’s for kids to move and dance and learn and feel good. It was very liberating for us to make a record like this.”
Snacktime also covers a wide range of musical styles and the singer confesses it wasn’t intentional in the beginning.
“It wasn’t really on our list of things to do, but the nice thing about it also was that we could do a lot of pastiche and tributes to different styles of music or different artists specifically and not have to worry about it. I think when you’re doing an album for adults we would always stop ourselves and go this sounds too much like this kind of music or this artist. With this record we say that’s OK, if it sounds like that then great.”
As for the next BNL record, Page reveals the band is heading back to the studio in October and aiming for an April release. “As far as direction it’s hard to tell. We go in as we start making the record and playing each other our songs and start working on it. Quite often we really don’t have a sense of what we’re gonna sound like until we’re right in the middle of it.”
